Quick Hits

Last month, when I started reading War and Peace again, this time with the intention of finishing it, I decided that I would do so methodically, opening the book at least once every day, and not closing it until I’d finished a chapter.

The image of the copy editor is of someone who favors a rigid consistency, a mean person who enjoys point­ing out other people’s errors, a lowly person who is just starting out on her career in publishing and is eager to make an impres­sion, or, at worst, a bitter, thwarted person who wanted to be a writer.

Fates and Furies has so far been cryptically described as “an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception,” and as, you’ll see, the book wastes no time introducing us to its protagonists.

Half-human creatures are vehicles for reconciling our species on the continuum of other beasts. Monsters are projections of an atavistic unease — born of the sense that something bigger and badder is out to get us. These stories get weird and totally out-of-hand, but they never end.

Eudora Welty edited her writing with scissors in hand to cut out and re-pin sections of text. Truman Capote fancied himself a horizontal writer: he would only work lying down, with a glass of sherry close at hand. Anthony Trollope maintained a rather more industrial regimen, beginning his day promptly at 5:30 a.m. and pacing himself with a watch to write 250 words every 15 minutes.

The Bone Clocks is coming in September, but David Mitchell gave readers an early taste of something new last week, tweeting out a short story called “The Right Sort” over the course of roughly seven days. The Millions now exclusively has the entire story, collected in one place.

When we talk about books, we tend to think in terms of great works of art and forget that for most people books are merely a handy thing to have around for that idle moment when there isn’t something else better to do. Now those idle moments are being filled by screens.